Background prior art relating to electronic document reading devices can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,124,851, US2004/0201633, US2006/0133664, US2006/0125802, US2006/0139308, US2006/0077190, US2005/0260551, U.S. Pat. No. 6,124,851, U.S. Pat. No. 6,021,306, US2005/0151742, and US2006/0119615. Examples of electronic document reading devices are the Iliad Hex®, the Amazon Kindle® and the Sony® Reader. Background prior art relating to power saving can be found in: US2007/0028086, US2007/0115258, and U.S. Pat. No. 7,058,829.
We have previously described electronic document reading devices using an electrophoretic display with a flexible or flex-tolerant backplane based on plastic (solution-deposited) electronics, for example in our earlier applications PCT/GB2006/050235, PCT/GB2008/050980, PCT/GB2008/050977, PCT/GB2008/050985, PCT/GB2008/050985, and PCT/GB2008/050985, hereby incorporated by reference. We have described an electronic document reading device with a touch sensitive display using resistive touch screen technology in WO2007/012899, and a device using projected capacitance touch sensing in our UK patent application GB 0916806.3 entitled “Touch Screen Displays” filed 24 Sep. 2009.
The inventors are aiming to produce a flex-tolerant, thin, large area electronic document reading device using the flexible display screen technology we have previously described. For example in embodiments the device is able to provide a touch-sensitive display of an A4 or Letter format page at least 0.7:1, preferably substantially 1:1 size on a flex-tolerant device with a front-rear thickness of substantially less than 1 cm. However the construction of a large-area, thin, flex-tolerant device with a large touch screen presents special problems.